Non-Critical Care
by gallifreyburning
Summary: Why Matt wandered into her ER instead of calling on that damn cell phone he gave her, like Claire was his personal wound-tailoring service, she doesn't know.


Claire's only halfway through her first shift back at Metro General when she hears the whispers at the nurse's station.

"Did you see him, all beat to hell? Half those stitches torn open, too. It isn't right, somebody going after a blind man like that."

She scans the admittance sheets until she finds what she's looking for. Miracle of miracles, he used his real name when he walked into the ER. Skipping right over whatever bullshit reason Matt gave when he was admitted, she zeroes in on his bed number.

Why he didn't just call on that damn cell phone he gave her, like Claire was his personal wound-tailoring service, she doesn't know. She's spent ten days halfway down the Eastern seaboard, staying with family, trying to get some perspective. She came back to Hell's Kitchen with Wilson Fisk's name in the headlines and her feet steady underneath her, and Matt's already rocking the boat again.

When she barges into his room, he's alone. They've got him trussed up with an oxygen mask and a blood-oxygen monitor on his finger, in addition to an IV.

"Goddammit, Matt," she blurts out. It wasn't exactly what she wanted her first words to be, but at least it's honest.

His drooping eyes open and move in her general direction, without focusing. He croaks out a word – probably her name – but it's smothered by the mask. Only when she gets to his bedside does she realize how paperwhite his skin is, and how sunken his cheeks are.

"What did you get yourself into this time? Some of those haywire Stark robots, or just run-of-the-mill mob thugs?" she says, automatically falling into her regular nurse's routine. She surveys the beeping monitors beside him, then picks up his wrist to check his pulse. His skin is clammy.

"Pneumonia," he says, and follows the word with a very convincing round of deep, chesty coughing. His body curls up in pain as his torso convulsively heaves, trying to clear his airway. She pulls the oxygen mask off his face, so he doesn't feel like he's suffocating.

The coughing dies down, and he collapses back into his pillows. He reaches for her hand, and she squeezes his fingers on instinct.

"Pneumonia?" She stretches for the chart hanging at the foot of the bed. Sure enough – recently collapsed lung and scarcely-healed cuts and bruising to his torso, compounded with prolonged exposure to the elements. Fighting in the rain, probably, because god forbid criminals conduct their illegal business on a pleasant sunny afternoon.

"The doctors all complimented your stitch-work. I wanted to brag about you, but don't worry, I didn't tell them who did it," he says, voice scratchy and thick. "Very professional, such a shame I can't keep still long enough so they don't get pulled out, they said."

"What did I tell you about body armor?" she sighs.

"Oh! I got some. It's a full suit, mask and all," he replies. "You'll like it. It's got little pointy things on top of my head. My tailor took the 'devil' theme and ran with it."

"Did he charge you extra for the horns?"

"He threw them in for free." Claire smiles in spite of herself, and Matt tries to sit up, twisting to drop his feet over the side. "Thank goodness you're here. You have to help me get home."

He's so weak, she doesn't even have to fight to get him back down onto the pillows. He collapses at her touch. "Oh, you're not going anywhere. We medical professionals have a hospitalization checklist for pneumonia, and you've ticked every single box. Your life's going to be IV antibiotics and cafeteria jello for a few days. How did you even get here in the first place? What with the martyr impulse, I figured you'd heroically wheeze to death on your living room floor, before you came into the hospital for treatment."

"I collapsed at the office," Matt says. "Foggy brought me in. We have a case this afternoon, and I'm missing opening arguments."

"At least someone else in your life has common sense. Do you even have health insurance, in that law startup of yours?"

He coughs again, mildly this time, more out of discomfort than anything. "Um. It's on the business plan, Foggy created a spreadsheet with all the to-do items last month."

"Great," Claire sighs. "I have to get to my regular rounds, but I'll come back in a while to check on you. And I'll make sure they transfer you to a decent room upstairs."

Matt swallows, his head turned in her direction, his hand trembling slightly in hers. "Thank you, Claire. I know you're not glad to see me again, but I'm glad you're here."

The blood-oxygen monitor attached to his finger starts beeping. Claire fits the oxygen mask over his face again, and absently cards her hand through his hair. "I wouldn't have you dying on my couch, and I won't have you dying in my hospital either. Rest, Matt."

His head tracks her movement as she leaves the room.

She pauses outside the door for a few minutes, hardly breathing, quiet and still. Before she can go through with her plan to peek around the doorframe, to verify that he isn't trying to climb out of bed again, he pipes up, "I'm not going anywhere. You can stop lurking outside my room and get back to work."

"You realize how full-on creepy that is, right?" she says, hands on her hips. "Smelling me, or listening to my heartbeat, or whatever it is you're doing right now?"

"Probably just as creepy as you stalking me from outside my hospital room," he retorts, and then he dissolves into another coughing fit, thrashing on the bed.

Claire leaves to get back to her other duties.

If Matt helped her survive a hostage situation with Russian gangsters, she can help him survive the convoluted maze of healthcare in her hospital – figuring out a way around the insurance issue, making sure he gets transferred into a good wing with attentive nurses, keeping an eye on his vitals through the computer at the nurse's station during her shift.

She lingers an extra half-hour after she's supposed to clock off, to make sure his transfer upstairs goes smoothly. She doesn't visit him again, though. She promised she'd be there, when he really needed her, but nothing else.

Which is why she's so furious during her time off, when she ought to be sleeping, but she's halfway through making a pot of her grandmother's chicken noodle instead. She stabs celery and flings noodles into the broth with the same gusto she had when braining a Russian mobster with a baseball bat.

When Claire was eleven years old, she found a kitten in the alley behind her tenement building. It was bleeding and half-dead, both eyes poked out by the local punks who tormented animals to get their rocks off. Claire bundled the broken ball of fur into her sweater and brought it home. She tended it with the same loving attentiveness her grandmother used in caring for her cancer-riddled grandfather. She bound up its fractured leg, cleaned its wounds, fed it milk with a medicine-dropper. When she wasn't holding it, she let it sleep on a hot water bottle. She put an alarm clock nearby, so the ticking noise would remind it of a mother's heartbeat.

The kitten still died a week later.

There were other animals to rescue, after that. But Claire never escaped the initial lingering sense of failure, or the fear that all her efforts wouldn't be enough for the lost creatures in need of her care.

Claire plunges the knife into a carrot on the cutting board, chopping wildly. Matt Murdock is not a goddamn kitten.

The next night, she shows up fifteen minutes early and drops off the thermos of hot chicken noodle in Matt's room. His face is still wan, and the thin polka-dotted hospital gown looks ridiculous draped across his stout chest. The minute she walks through the door, he reaches up to try and smooth the fluffy hair standing in a wild thatch atop his head. His preening effort is interrupted by a coughing fit, this one less violent than yesterday.

"I've seen what goes into the cafeteria food around here. If you must, get the orange jello instead of lime," she says, popping open the thermos lid and putting a spoon into his hand. "Just do us both a favor and stay away from the casseroles."

"That smells amazing," he says, pulling the breathing mask off his face and leaning down over the tray.

"It tastes amazing, too. Don't get it on your oxygen mask, or the nurses will be angry. They'll have to clean it up."

"Yes ma'am," he says, flashing a broad, happy smile.

"I can't stay. I've got to get to work."

"Saving people. I know."

Claire's nose wrinkles and she frowns. "Don't do that."

Confusion flashes across his face, tinged with hurt, because he was trying to say something nice. He lowers his eyelids and nods. "Thanks again for the soup."

During her break, halfway through the night shift, she slips into the empty manager's office and spends a few minutes jiggering with the insurance codes on his account, shifting letters and numbers until Matt's bill comes down to a reasonable number of digits. She puts in a note that he's to be discharged early, so the amount doesn't grow out of control again.

A few visitors come and go from his room, but Claire doesn't look in on him again.

The next day, she brings another thermos full of soup. He's not wearing the oxygen mask anymore, and his cheeks and mouth are pink.

"Here," she says, digging through her purse and pulling out a tube of Chapstick. "Oxygen treatments are hell on the lips."

He feels his way along the tube until he finds the cap. "This is like Christmas. Don't suppose you have a hairbrush in that bag, too?"

"Nope," Claire says, shoving her comb to the bottom. "Don't you have friends to bring you supplies from your apartment? Shampoo and clean underwear?"

"I didn't want to bother them. They're busy with the court case," Matt says.

Of course he didn't. Of course he's been suffering in noble silence, wearing the same underwear for days on end. "You ought to be discharged in a day or so."

"I suppose I have to cancel the half-marathon I was going to run this afternoon."

"Probably for the best," Claire says.

"Thanks for the soup, and the Chaptstick."

"Stay in that bed."

He gives a mock salute. "Yes ma'am."

When she peeks in on him before clocking off, he's got the television on and a newspaper folded up, untouched, at the end of his bed.

"I think someone left it as a joke," Matt says. Claire turns off the tv, sits down in the chair beside him, and reads aloud for half an hour. He listens, and asks questions; he laughs at the movie reviews and is very very quiet during the articles about Wilson Fisk. Fisk isn't on the front page anymore, but there's still a trickle of information on a regular basis, because a criminal empire like his is deep and wide enough to keep reporters and government investigators busy for years.

When Claire clocks in the next night, he's already been discharged.

The ER has a banner night, in terms of violent injuries. None of the patients have anything to say about a man in a mask, but Claire sees Matt's fingerprints everywhere they probably aren't – broken ribs, compound leg fractures, road rash.

The hospital feels weirdly empty, and Claire's mind weirdly preoccupied, without him in a room upstairs.

Exhausted and dying for a shower, just as the sun is beginning to rise, she keys open her apartment door. There's someone in her kitchen; the smell of cooking food saturates through to the living room.

"Don't panic," Matt says, stepping out of the kitchen door with both hands in the air. "I wanted to return the chicken soup favor, and make you breakfast."

"You should still be resting," she says, smiling in spite of herself. "You're definitely not well enough for B&E. Plus, it's illegal. You could, y'know, wait until I'm home and knock like a normal person."

"Point taken. I'll do better next time." He tilts his head, scratching at the back of his neck. "Is that what I am? A normal person?"

"Do you want to be?"

He sighs. "I'd like to try, for this morning. I can step outside and knock, if you'd like?"

Claire closes her eyes and inhales. "Is that – do I smell pancakes?"

"Blueberry," he replies.

"I love blueberries."

Matt's grin is broad and infectious. He gestures back toward the kitchen. "Will you come cut oranges for juice?"

"Don't tell me you're worried about using a knife," she says, walking past him into the kitchen.

He laughs, low and relieved. "I couldn't find one, since I …"

"Since you borrowed my good paring knife to fight gangsters?" Claire bumps his hip with her own; he bends at her touch, absorbing the gentle impact. "I think I have another one around here somewhere."

When he leaves an hour later, she grabs his hand at the door. His fingers are warm and yielding as she squeezes. "Go home and rest. Take your full course of antibiotics. Let yourself heal, stitches and pneumonia and all. I don't want you in my ER again."

"Nurse's orders?"

"Just a favor, for a friend," Claire replies, reaching up with her free hand to brush the fringe from Matt's face. "One normal person to another."

Finally conceding to impulse, she leans onto her toes and plants a kiss at the corner of his mouth. His soft lips, the stubble tickling against her chin, the brush of his hand up her arm, she wants to fall into those sensations and never come up for air again.

The contact is brief, and Matt closes his eyes and rocks forward to chase after her mouth.

"You taste like coffee and pancakes," she whispers as she shifts back, out of reach, and crosses her arms.

"Sorry," he says, ducking his head and turning away. "Sorry. Thanks again, for your help at the hospital."

He's halfway down the hall when she steps out and calls after him, "Matt? Next time, what about chocolate? Chocolate chip pancakes are my favorite."

Pausing, only half turning so she sees his profile, he grins. "I'll knock on the door. One normal person to another."


End file.
